Salt Lake City: Official Development News Thread - Part 4

[Comrade]

This place has jumped the shark. I love you guys but Jesus it's maddening how quickly some of you link all of SLC's woes to the homeless. Every week we return back to just how god-awful those people are and how they're ruining our city.

Truth is, they're not - they're part of the fabric of every city. Gateway isn't struggling because of the homeless people. It's struggling because SLC is too small to have two major retail centers competing with one another. We've been saying this for years and years. It was the focus of the debate around the time Gateway was opening and then the focus of the debate when City Creek was being planned.

The difference is that Gateway was supposed to hurt Main Street but because a lot was invested in Main, especially by the LDS Church, it went the other way - City Creek & Main hurt Gateway.

We just aren't big enough to have both and that struggle has nothing to do with the homelessness on the west-side of downtown. In fact, you could say the homelessness is a direct result of the failed development of that area over the last 40 years. Even still, most every major city can coexist between its population and the homeless population. Salt Lake can too. It's just one of the trade offs of living, working or retailing in a central city.